Outlook emails retrieval

Question

I'm trying to retrieve my outlook emails saved on my local machine because I can't access them anymore. I used them with outlook at work which required me to log in to their domain. However now that I have a new job, I forgot to back up those emails up and cannot access the old domain.

I'm wondering if there's anyway I can retrieve those emails because I think they are still saved on the harddrive right?

Answer 1

The answer depends on whether you were connected to Exchange and stored your mail on Exchange, or whether you used a local PST file to store your mail.

If it is the first there is no way to retrieve them, as only the headers are stored in an OST file on your local machine, and can only be accessed when authenticated against that domain.

If it is the latter the process is fairly simple. In Outlook you can open the PST file directly.

• Click on File
• Click on Open - Outlook Data File
• Browse for the PST - Normally under %ApplicationData%\Microsoft\Outlook\
• Click on Open

It may prompt you for a password, which should be your old network password if at all.

There is also a nice How To on this available here

Answer 2

One more note (and I'm clearly not a Super User because I can't figure out how to reply to a threaded answer on this thing.)

1. If your computer still has the old domain credentials cached, and you can log onto the computer but not the domain (and hence the Exchange server) AND if you had Outlook set up to work in cached mode (which I think you did because of the OST file) you can simply log into your computer using your old domain account, fire up Exchange while you're NOT connected to the internet, and export the emails.
2. If you can't log in using your old credentials, there are programs that will convert OST to PST files (usually called OST2PST.) I remember finding a free one once, but now Google is only giving me $100-$600 options.